Famous Indian Chiefs I Have Known
I was just preparing some questions for Luba Golburt’s upcoming presentation on Pushkin and the historical novel, when I made an interesting discovery. If you go to Google Books and look up The Historical Novel by Georg Lukács, the book whose cover is displayed is not The Historical Novel by Georg Lukács, but, rather, Famous Indian Chiefs I Have Known, by Major General O. O. Howard.
Seriously: check it out.
I had actually noticed a similar phenomenon last month, when I was working on a review of Andrei Platonov’s Soul. Upon searching for “Platonov + ‘socialist realism,’” I was directed to a lengthy citation from Simon MacLean’s Kingship and Politics in the Late Ninth Century: Charles the Fat and the End of the Carolingian Empire (Cambridge UP, 2003).
At that point I was already so weirded-out from reading Platonov, that it took me fifteen minutes to figure out that it was a bug—i.e., that Simon MacLean isn’t actually obsessed by the huge, presumably allegorical relevance of Platonov to the decline of the Carolingian Empire (although Platonov did write about a declining empire…), and that, although the page headers say Kingship and Politics, the text is actually from Thomas Seifrid’s Andrei Platonov: Uncertainties of Spirit (Cambridge UP, 1992). I was still really freaked out, and never mentioned this episode to anybody.
But today I was feeling more sort of enterprising and desperate, and decided to look into the matter of the Indian Chiefs. Conveniently, Major General Howard’s work may be accessed in its entirety through The Baldwin Online Children’s Literature Project (“Bringing Yesterday’s Classics to Today’s Children”). I was truly mesmerised by the last chapter, “Geronimo, the Last Apache Chief On the War-Path,” which opens “far off in the
People wanted to see him as much as they did the Filipinos from
Manila , the Boers fromSouth Africa , or the Eskimos fromAlaska , and hardly any one went away without asking to see Geronimo, the great Apache war chief. His photographs were in great demand, and he had learned to write his name, so he sold his autographs and made a good deal of money… He was very much interested in other people from all over the world… [and in] animals he had never seen before—bears from the icy north, elephants fromAfrica , learned horses…Nothing escaped him, and everything he saw was full of interest to him.
In fact this text was relatively relevant to my search, since the quote I was looking for from Lukács was the one about “genres which are compelled by their content and form to appear as living images of the totality of life”—which is pretty much Geronimo’s genre at the St. Louis Fair.
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Geronimo at the World Fair, 1904 |
Geronimo comic, 1951 |
In terms of genre, there really is an affinity between the historical novel and the anthropological-zoological World Fair–type display. One of the main texts in Golburt’s paper, Ivan Lazhechnikov’s House of Ice (see previous entry), opens with a three-hundred-person “ethnographic parade” of “bridal couples,” representing the different human and animal populations of the Russian Empire:
Ostyaks riding on deer… followed by Novgorodians on a pair of goats, Ukrainians on bulls, Petersburg Finns on donkeys, a Tatar with his Tataress, mounted on well-fed pigs, to demonstrate the conquering of both nature and custom. Then there were red-haired Finns on miniature horses, Kamchadals riding dogs,
Kalmyks on camels…
In the cosmic historical conspiracy that is the human condition, here is something Anna Ioannovna had in common with Charles the Fat: they were both fat.
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Tags: academic life, comparative literature, Luba Golburt, Pushkin, Russian literature, Stanford